The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

by Simon Mawer

  Also by Simon Mawer

  Chimera

  A Place in Italy

  The Bitter Cross

  A Jealous God

  Mendel’s Dwarf

  The Gospel of Judas

  The Fall

  Swimming to Ithaca

  Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics

  The Glass Room

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-7481-2880-8

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Simon Mawer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Also by Simon Mawer

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Trapeze

  London

  Scotland

  England

  First Moon

  France

  Second Moon

  Paris

  Toulouse

  Paris

  Third Moon

  Vierzon

  To the memory of Colette, one of the women of SOE.

  Foreword

  The French section of the Special Operations Executive sent thirty-nine women into the field between May 1941 and September 1944. Of these, twelve were murdered following their capture by the Germans, while one other died of meningitis during her mission. The remainder survived the war. Some of these women became well known to the public through films and books that were written about them. Others remained, and remain, obscure. They were all remarkable.

  Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés.

  Florian

  Trapeze

  She’s sitting in the fuselage, trussed like a piece of baggage, battered by noise. Half an hour earlier they manhandled her up through the door because she was too encumbered with her parachute to climb the ladder unassisted; now she is just there, with the sound drumming on her ears, and the inadequate light and the hard metal and packages all around her.

  If only she could sleep, like Benoît. He’s sitting opposite, his eyes closed and his head rocking with the movement of the machine. Like a passenger on a train. It’s one of the most infuriating things about him, his ability to sleep wherever and whenever he pleases.

  The dispatcher – young, gauche, prominent Adam’s apple and slicked hair – stumbles towards her through the racket. He seems a kind of Charon, accompanying the souls of the dead towards Hades. Her father would love that thought. His classical allusions. ‘Illusions’, she always called them. The airman grins ghoulishly at her and bends to open the hatch in the floor, releasing night and cold into the fuselage like water rushing in from a sprung leak. Looking down she can see the huddled buildings of a town sliding beneath, smudged with cloud and lit by the moon, a mysterious seabed over which their craft floats. Benoît opens one eye to see what’s going on, gives her a quick smile and returns to his sleep.

  ‘CAEN!’ the dispatcher shouts above the noise. He begins to bundle packets of paper out into the blackness, like a manic delivery boy throwing newspapers to his customers in the darkness of a winter morning. The bundles crack open as they drop into the void. He thrusts one of the leaflets towards her so that she can read the news.

  La Revue du Monde Libre, it says, apportée par la RAF.

  ‘’COURSE, THE FRENCHIES JUST USE ’EM TO WIPE THEIR ARSES!’ he shouts. ‘BUT IT MAKES JERRY THINK THAT’S WHAT WE’RE HERE FOR. GIVES US AN ALIBI, SEE? WE DON’T WANT THEM TO THINK WE’RE DROPPING SOMEONE LIKE YOU.’

  She smiles. Someone like you. But who, exactly?

  Marian.

  Alice.

  Anne-Marie Laroche.

  A package to be delivered, like a bundle of leaflets.

  Without warning the machine begins to pitch, a boat struck by waves. ‘FLAK!’ the dispatcher shouts, seeing her look of surprise. He’s grinning, as though flak is nothing, and indeed there is nothing to be heard above the racket of the engines, no sound of shells bursting, no intimation that people down below are trying to kill them, nothing more than this pitching and banking.

  ‘WE’LL SOON BE OVER IT!’

  And sure enough, they are soon over it and the aircraft roars on, the hatch closed, through calmer waters.

  Later, the youth brings her and Benoît a thermos of tea and some sandwiches. Benoît scoffs his down hungrily – ‘Eat, mon p’tit chat,’ he tells her, but she cannot eat for the same reason that she couldn’t eat at the safe house before they went to the airfield, that slow, knotted constriction of her stomach muscles that had tightened up inside her from the moment that Vera had said, ‘TRAPEZE is scheduled for the next moon. Assuming the weather’s kind, of course.’ That was when the pain began, a dull ache like period pains, when it wasn’t her period at all.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Vera asked her as they made their final preparations at the airfield. She had the manner of a nurse enquiring after a patient – concerned, but with a certain detachment, as though this were no more than a task to complete before moving on to the next bed.

  ‘Of course I’m all right.’

  ‘You look pale.’

  ‘It’s the damned English weather.’

  And now it’s the French weather outside, buffeting the aircraft as it hammers on through the night. When she has finished the tea she manages to sleep, a nodding, awkward sleep more like a patient slipping in and out of consciousness than someone getting rest. And then she is awake again, with the dispatcher shaking her shoulder and shouting in her ear: ‘WE’RE NEARLY THERE, LOVE! GET YOURSELF READY!’

  Love. She likes that. English comfort. The hatch in the floor is opened once more, and as she peers down she sees something new, pale fields and dark woods skidding past below the aircraft, almost close enough to touch. The vasty fields of France, her father used to say. Benoît is wide awake now and alert, patting his pockets to make sure all is ready, zipping things up, checking his kit.

  The plane tilts, turning in a wide circle, engines roaring. She can imagine the pilot up in the cockpit, searching, searching, straining to see the tiny glimmers of torchlight which mean that they are expected down there in the dark. A lamp comes on in the roof of the fuselage, a single, unblinking red eye. The dispatcher gives the thumbs-up. ‘HE’S FOUND IT!’

  There’s a note of admiration and triumph in his shout, as though this proves what wonders his crew are able to perform, to come all this way in the darkness, eight hundred miles from home, and find a pinprick of light in a blackened world. He attaches the static line from their parachutes to the rail in the roof of the fuselage and double-checks the buckles of their harnesses. The aircraft makes one pass over the dropping zone, and she can hear the sound of the containers leaving the bomb bay and see them flash beneath, their canopies billowing open. Then the machine banks and turns and steadies for the second run.

  ‘YOUR TURN NOW!’ the dispatcher yells at the pair of them.

  ‘Merde alors!’ Benoît mouths to Marian, and grins. He looks infuriatingly unconcerned, as though this is all in the normal run of things, as though as a matter of course people throw themselves out of aircraft over unknown countryside in the middle of the night.

  Merde alors!

  She sits with her feet out through the hole, in the slipstream, like sitting o
n a rock with your feet in the water, the current pulling at them. Benoît is right behind her. She can feel him against the bulk of her parachute pack, as though the pack has become a sensitive extension of her own body. She says a prayer, a baby prayer pulled out of childhood memory, but nevertheless a prayer and therefore a sign of weakness: God, please look after me. Which means, perhaps, Father look after me, or Maman look after me, but whatever it means she doesn’t want any sign of weakness now, not at this moment of deliverance with the slipstream rushing past her and the void beneath, while the dispatcher gives her a nod that’s meant to inspire confidence but only brings with it the horror of superstition, that you must never congratulate yourself, never applaud, never even wish anyone good luck. Merde alors! That was all you ever said. Merde alors! she thinks, a prayer of a kind, as the red light blinks off and the green comes on and the dispatcher shouts, ‘GO!’ and there’s his hand on her back and she lets go, plunging from the rough comfort of the fuselage into the raging darkness over France.

  London

  I

  His name was Potter, which seemed unlikely. He had a querulous, fluting voice and a distant manner, as though perhaps she was not really suitable for his requirements but he would see her anyway, out of politeness. ‘Thank you for coming all this way,’ he said. ‘And for taking time off from your work. Do, please, make yourself at home.’

  The exhortation seemed impossible to fulfil: the room itself was stripped almost bare. There was the space where a bed might have been – a headboard was attached to the wall and there were two little shelves that would have been bedside tables, but apart from that the only furniture was a table and two chairs. A bare light bulb hung from the ceiling.

  She sat, neither forward on the edge of the chair, nor back as though she were in the sitting room at home, neither one thing nor the other but upright, relaxed and watchful while Potter sat opposite her and smiled benignly. He was an undistinguished-looking man, the kind that her father called a bank-manager type. Except bank managers always had moustaches and wore dark suits; but this man was cleanshaven and wearing a tweed jacket, with a waistcoat. A headmaster, she decided. A headmaster about to interview a difficult pupil, the kind of head who asks questions rather than delivers lectures. The kind that lets you tie yourself in knots. The Socratic method.

  ‘Now, I expect you are wondering why I’ve invited you here …?’

  His letter had asked her not to come in uniform. She’d thought that strange at the time, even slightly peculiar. Why not in uniform, when the whole damn world was in uniform? So she’d chosen something plain and businesslike – a navy skirt and jacket with a white blouse, and the only decent pair of shoes she had managed to bring from Geneva. She’d tried to avoid using them too much in the last couple of years. They were too precious. And silk stockings, she wore silk stockings. Her last pair.

  ‘You said something about French in your letter. You had use for my language ability.’

  ‘Exactly. Peut-être …’ Potter paused and smiled deprecatingly. ‘Peut-être nous devrions parler français?’

  There was an English accent and a certain woodenness about the phrasing, as though he was using the language consciously rather than naturally. But he did it well enough. She shrugged, and followed his lead, slipping from one language to the other with that strange facility that she had and her father could never manage. ‘The thing is, Papa,’ she had told him once, ‘for you it’s two languages. But it’s not for me. For me there’s only one language. I simply use the bits of it that are appropriate at the time.’ And so the rest of this conversation, a very guarded, evasive conversation, was in French, Potter with his quaint formalities, Marian with her rapid flutter of colloquialisms.

  ‘I must emphasise from the start,’ he warned her, ‘that the work would be of a most secret nature. Everything about it, even our meeting here today, must be held in absolute confidence. It all comes under the Official Secrets Act. You do understand that, don’t you? I believe you have already signed the act because of your work in the WAAF. But we do like to be sure.’

  So she signed the form once more, a solemn little ceremony like a registry-office marriage, for which Mr Potter lent his fountain pen and waited reverently for the ink to dry.

  ‘So tell me a little about yourself, Miss Sutro. The name, for example. Not Jewish, is it?’

  ‘Sutro? It may have been once, I don’t really know. My father is C of E, and his father was even a vicar. Which led to a certain amount of difficulty when Papa married my mother because she is Roman Catholic. That’s how we were brought up – RC.’

  ‘That all sounds most regular. But one has to be sure.’

  ‘That I’m not a Jew? You don’t want Jews?’

  ‘We have to be sure that people of the, er, Jewish persuasion are fully aware of the risks.’

  ‘What risks?’

  There was a small tremor of impatience in his voice. ‘Perhaps I should be asking the questions, Miss Sutro. I wonder, how did you acquire your command of the language?’

  She shrugged. ‘I didn’t acquire my command of the language. I simply learned to speak, as everyone does. It just happened to be French. My mother is French. We lived in Geneva.’

  ‘But you also speak excellent English.’

  ‘That was from my father, of course. And at school we also spoke English as well as French. It was an international school. And then I spent three years at boarding school in England.’

  ‘What was your father doing in Geneva?’

  ‘He worked for the League of Nations.’ She paused and asked, with irony, ‘Do you remember the League of Nations, Mr Potter?’

  II

  At the second meeting he put his cards on the table. The expression was his. They met as before: the same place – an anonymous building on Northumberland Avenue that had once been a hotel – the same room, the same two chairs and bare table and bare light bulb, but this time she accepted his offer of a cigarette. She wasn’t really a smoker, but working in the Filter Room at Bentley Priory, particularly on nights, turned you into one; and anyway, it made her look older to have a cigarette in her hand and somehow she wanted to appear older in the eyes of this man, despite the fact that he knew her real age and so couldn’t be deceived.

  ‘How do you feel about our first encounter?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘You didn’t really tell me anything very specific. The Inter Services Research Bureau could be anything.’

  He nodded. Indeed it could be anything. ‘At that meeting you talked, quite eloquently I thought, of your love of France, of the fact that you wanted to do something more directly for her.’

  ‘That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? My language.’

  ‘More or less.’ He considered her, watching her with an expression that was almost one of sadness. ‘Marian, would you be prepared to leave this country in order to pursue this work?’

  ‘Go overseas? Certainly. Algeria or somewhere?’

  ‘Actually, I mean France itself.’

  There was a pause. It might have seemed as though she hadn’t quite understood. ‘Are you serious, Mr Potter?’

  ‘Certainly, I’m serious. The organisation that I represent trains people to work in France.’

  She waited, drawing in smoke from the cigarette, determined not to let him see any change in her manner. But there was a change, a fluttering of excitement directly behind her breastbone.

  ‘I want to be frank with you, Marian. I want to put my cards on the table. It would be dangerous work. You’d be in danger of your life. But it would be of enormous value to the war effort. I want you to consider the possibility of doing something like that.’

  She seemed to think about the suggestion but her mind had been made up long ago, before even this second interview had begun, when she had guessed that something extraordinary might be about to happen. ‘I would love to,’ she said.

  Potter smiled. It was an expression entirely without humour, the tired smile of a
man who deals with overenthusiastic children. ‘I don’t actually want your answer now. I want you to go away and think about it. You’ve got a week’s leave—’

  ‘A week’s leave?’ Leave from the Filter Room was almost impossible to come by.

  He nodded. ‘You have a week’s leave. Go home and think it over. Talk it over with your father. The only thing you may let him know is that you may be sent on some kind of secret mission overseas, and that you will be in some danger. If you accept, you will go to a unit that will assess your potential for this particular work in greater depth. It may be that they will decide that my own judgement of your talents was wrong and you are not suitable for the work we are doing. In that case, after a suitable debriefing, you will return to your normal duties and no one will be any the wiser. If the assessment unit decides to move you on to training, then you will begin the work in earnest. Training will take some months before you go into the field.’

  ‘It sounds fascinating.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s the word I would use. You must warn your parents that if you accept this work, you will, to all intents and purposes, disappear from their lives until it is all over. Although your family will be contacted on your behalf by the organisation from time to time and informed that you are well, you will have no direct contact with them and they will have no further information as to your whereabouts. You must tell friends or relatives that you are being posted abroad. Nothing more. Do you understand that?’

  ‘I think so.’ She paused, considering this man and his solemn, headmaster’s face. ‘What are the risks?’

  He breathed in deeply, as though preparing to deliver judgement. ‘We estimate – it is no more than an estimate – that the chances of survival are about fifty-fifty.’

  ‘Fifty-fifty?’ It seemed absurd. The toss of a coin. How could she not feel fear? But it was the fear that she had felt skiing, the fear of plummeting steepness, the fear she had had when her uncle had taken her climbing, the awe-inspiring fear of space beneath her feet, a fear that teetered on the very edge of joy. She wanted to make a grand gesture, to laugh with happiness and cry ‘Yes!’, even to leap out of her chair and throw her arms around this strange man with his shrill portents of doom. Instead she nodded thoughtfully. ‘What about my unit?’